Pope Cites French Poem To 'Prove' Christianity As Violent As Islam

Pope cites French epic poem to “prove” Christianity is as violent as Islam

BY CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS

“Pope Francis trotted out a scene from the 11th-century French epic poem La Chanson de Roland this week to prove Christians have tried to convert Muslims by the sword, just as Muslims have done to Christians.”

The Pope’s moral equivalence is obscene at best. He also stated: “Beware of the fundamentalist groups: everyone has his own.”

True, but no religion but Islam has a history of aggression and an imperative — supported by religious texts — to conquer the world and subjugate unbelievers as inferiors, while murdering those who leave the faith.

Nowhere in Christian tenets is there a command to conquer by the sword; however, this is prescribed in Islamic texts and law, and has been steadily followed in varying degrees for 1,400 years.

Christians also defended themselves against expansionary Islamic marauders from the 7th century onward, as the latter rampaged through the Middle East and Africa, murdering far more Christians than Christians killed Muslims in all the Crusades combined.

And they’re still doing it. Christians are facing genocide at the hands of Muslims in the Middle East and Africa; most of the world ignores this, including the Pope, who instead insists that “it’s not fair to identify Islam with violence.”

The Pope has been a powerful promoter of Islam, going so far as advance theological reforms in Catholic schools to promote a “common mission of peace” with Islam. He largely ignores the gross human rights violations against Christians, women, minorities and apostates that are justified by normative Islam. He has not called on the leaders of Islamic states and mainstream Islamic leaders to condemn the Islamic texts that sanction such abuses. Instead, he has stated that “Christianity and Islam have more in common than people think…and the two religions defend common values that are necessary for the future of civilization.”

“Hours before Pope Francis called for the abolition of capital punishment” last Friday, he warmly embraced the Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayeb — the revered Islamic scholar and cleric who has endorsed jihad suicide attacks against Jews and wants converts to Christianity to be killed. Pope Francis and el-Tayeb early this year published “A Document On Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together.”

Then last month, Pope Francis installed new cardinals who “share his vision for social justice, rights of immigrants and dialogue with Islam.”

“Pope Cites Fictional French Epic to Prove Christians Are Violent,” by Thomas D. Williams, Breitbart, November 21, 2019:

ROME — Pope Francis trotted out a scene from the 11th-century French epic poem La Chanson de Roland this week to prove Christians have tried to convert Muslims by the sword, just as Muslims have done to Christians.

“A scene from The Song of Roland comes to me as a symbol, when the Christians defeat the Muslims and line them up in front of the baptismal font, with one holding a sword,” the pope told an Argentinian interreligious dialogue group Monday.

“And the Muslims had to choose between baptism or the sword. That is what we Christians did,” he declared.

It did not take long for the French themselves to cry foul, reproaching the pontiff both for besmirching one of their most beloved pieces of epic literature and for using a fictional narrative to illustrate a point about how Christians supposedly behave.

“La Chanson de Roland is obviously not a historical chronicle of events, but an epic poem, a chanson de geste, the oldest and most complete manuscript, written in Anglo-Norman, and dates back to the early twelfth century, four centuries after the facts it is supposed to recount,” wrote Vini Ganimara Thursday for the French Catholic news site Riposte Catholique.

The Song of Roland was indeed inspired in part by a historical event, namely Charlemagne’s expedition to Spain in 778, Ganimara observes, but this expedition to Spain was actually undertaken at the request of several Muslim governors of Spain, in rebellion against the Emir of Cordova.

Moreover, the invasion was unsuccessful, and is recounted as such in the poem.

“The memory of Pope Francis evoking the victory of the Franks over Muslims is therefore confused, because the expedition was not a victory,” Ganimara observes.

“The fictitious case of the forced baptism of Muslims supposedly defeated after the capture of Zaragoza — which did not take place — is not historical, but is a pure imagination of the poet,” he adds, noting that contrary to the pope’s account, there is not even a Christian holding a sword in the original work.

“How then can he affirm that ‘this is what we Christians did’?” he concludes.

In his address, Pope Francis was attempting to show that it is not just Islamic extremists who practice violent fanaticism, but that Christians are equally guilty of religiously motivated violence….